


Broken

by Venivincere



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Coda to ep 4x10, HEED THE WARNINGS IN THE AUTHOR NOTES, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Major character death not Derek or Stiles, child emotional abuse, child endangerment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 15:50:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2234679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Venivincere/pseuds/Venivincere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coda to Episode 4x10. What if Peter really weren’t, as he claimed, a lot more sane now? “<i>I said I’d remake each and every one of those monsters in my own image, and I did,” said Peter. “They’re all like me now. Broken.</i>”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse, emotional abuse and endangerment, all occurring off screen. Major character death, not Derek or Stiles. For a more thorough explanation of what "graphic descriptions" means, please see the Author Note at the end of the work.
> 
> This story sprang out of the dialog in episode 4x10 “Monstrous”, in the scene with Peter in the interrogation room with the Sheriff, Lydia, Parrish and Meredith, and some idle conversation I had with Isisanubis where she said something awesome and my mind flew into the dark places with it. Many thanks to Isisanubis for the beta. Any remaining errors are all mine.

Stiles breaks into the loft the way he always does, and grins while he does it. He knows Derek still hasn’t figured out how he does it, but two blowjobs into their relationship, Derek tells him, “Just don’t bring anyone else up here,” and leaves it at that.

Derek’s not there now, though; no one is. The smile drops off his face quickly. He’s there for one reason only: the code that will unlock Scott, and if he doesn’t get it to him in time, the band of alphas they’re fighting will get the upper hand. That’s not happening on Stiles’s watch if he can help it. Scott’s confident he can drive them out of Beacon Hills, but not while he’s trapped inside the Hale family vault’s new electronic walk-in safe.

“The code’s in the laptop on my desk,” says Derek, from where he’s lying on the ground with a gash in his leg. Kira’s got both hands pressing down hard on it until Stiles’s dad can get an ambulance to him. “Hurry.”

He sets it to search through hidden and system files, in case it’s buried somewhere sneaky. He scrolls through the files his search turns up, his heart pounding in his chest. He’s got his phone in one hand, getting a text ready to send to Scott once he finds the code, when his eye catches on a folder called “Broken,” and his curiosity gets the better of him.

It’s a shock when Stiles realizes what he’s looking at. Little kids, all of them. Some of them with wolf fangs and miniature sideburns, mouths open, watching something off-camera, panting in terror. Some of them flipped over a large man’s lap getting bare-butt spanked: one or two angry and muzzled, most crying, a couple obviously howling with tear-tracks and drool, in desperate need of a tissue. Too many of them with dead-eyed and hollowed out gazes.

Stiles’s stomach heaves, and he breaks out in a cold sweat. Some of the kids are clothed. Some are wearing no more than a leash and collar. Two little ones, both with a mouthful of wendigo teeth, are naked and filthy in a kennel. He can feel his eyes opening wider and wider as he clicks through the folder. The massiveness of the situation creates an inertia he’s powerless against. The train is going to wreck, and he’s at the very front, powerless to stop it. With each click, everything crumples before him: his relationship, his pack, his _life_. He can’t stop looking. The last picture’s of a werewolf no more than four years old in complete beta shift, confused and frightened. He’s sitting on a puppy pad in very wet pants, sobbing, wearing a cone of shame. There’s a red-eyed alpha behind him, full shift, unidentifiable, crouching over the kid with his cock in his claws, choking the life out of his knot. There’s a stream of white sliding down the outside of the cone and soaking into the collar of the little kid’s shirt. 

Stiles’s stomach twists and his blood lights up with a sick, angry haze of hate. He leans back from the laptop, spreads his legs, and vomits on the floor between his feet. When he’s finished, he unplugs the laptop from the wall and slips out of the loft with it. It isn’t until his phone dings with a message from Scott, _Did you find it?_ that Stiles gets hold of himself, steadies his breathing and his shaking hands, tears through the rest of the files until he finds the code, and texts it.

::-------------------------------------::

“Seriously, dude, what’s wrong?” 

They’re sitting in Stiles’s kitchen, drinking coffee and waiting for Stiles’s dad to get home. He’s cleaning up the bloodbath Scott left behind in a way that won’t implicate himself or his department.

A picture pops into Stiles’s head: a little beta pup with pointy ears and tiny fangs worrying bloody little holes through his lips, naked and glistening from the waist down, sitting on the lap of a full-shifted alpha. 

“Just tired. Really tired.” He hopes it’s enough of the truth to get Scott off his back. He doesn’t say his stomach is in knots, trying to reconcile the man who resented Kate with everything he had for what she stole from him in his youth, for what she stole from him more recently, with the kind of man who would look at those pictures. Get off on them. It’s the sickest, most twisted dictionary definition of the word, ‘dichotomy’. They are two parallel concepts, and there is nothing in his mind that he knows about Derek that could ever make them meet.

Scott stares at him. “…And?” Stiles can feel Scott’s eyes boring into the side of his head as he looks at his half-empty coffee cup. His stomach crawls up into his throat.

“Just – let’s wait for my dad.”

Scott stares at him. “Are you okay?”

Stiles’s breath catches in his throat, hard enough that he almost chokes on it. “No.”

Scott scoots his chair closer. He throws an arm over Stiles’s shoulder and squeezes. “Did you get the text from Derek?”

Bless him for knowing that Stiles needs a distraction, but fate’s a bitch and rubs his nose in it. Stiles swallows hard and grimaces. “No.”

Scott pulls his arm off Stiles and digs out his phone. “He says, ‘I’m stuck in the hospital until Melissa gets on shift. Did you send anyone up to the loft besides Stiles? Peter says someone robbed us last night during the attack. They stole the laptop.’ And, ‘Did Stiles see anyone?’ And, ‘Peter says if that was Stiles who barfed on the floor that he owes him for cleaning it up.’” Scott looks up at him. “Dude, did you barf?” he doesn’t wait for an answer and looks back down at the phone. “And, ‘Stiles isn’t answering his texts. Is he with you?’”

Stiles heaves out a breath about the barf – _heh_ – and if he tries hard enough, maybe he can convince himself it’s not a sob. He gulps. His backpack sits on the dining room chair next to him and he’s almost surprised the laptop inside doesn’t burst into flame. Wrenching his eyes away from it, he pulls his phone out of his pocket and finds the ringer turned off. “I didn’t see anyone. I’ll tell him.” He slings his backpack over his shoulder, shuddering when it hits his back, and dumps out the rest of his coffee.

“Where’re you going?”

“Going to clean up before my dad gets home. You can use the shower after me.”

Scott stares after him. “…Okay. Thanks.”

Stiles grabs some clean clothes out of his room, runs into the bathroom, and turns on the shower. He jams the lock and slides down the wall, lets his shoulders shake. He keeps his eyes shut and shoves toilet paper under his nose when it runs, as silent as possible, hoping Scott can’t hear him. Eventually, he pulls his phone out of his pocket. Five missed texts from Derek. One from Scott. One missed call from a number he doesn’t recognize, and a voicemail. He can’t bear to look at the texts from Derek, just opens the last one and sits there. His heart is beating a panicked tattoo and he can feel the panic rising, and he can’t tell this story more than once, he _can’t_ , so he quickly backs out of the text before he can read it and deep-breathes until his heart rate settles down and he’s sure Scott’s not about to pound up the stairs and break the door down.

When he’s calmed a bit, he punches in his voicemail password and hears, “Give. It. Back.” 

Something sharp and heavy rises from where it’s been sitting on his heart. Anguish, maybe. His vision clouds up and he blinks it away. Of course, it’s Peter. Not Derek. Of course. It makes so much more sense. Before he can beat himself up for feeling helium light, because those kids still suffered and he should never, will likely never be able to forget what he’s seen, he strips off and climbs into the shower. But he does feel bad for feeling better, feels dirty with it, and no amount of scrubbing removes those stains.

Fate eases up, or maybe his luck has turned, or maybe he just spent an inordinately long time soaping and rinsing, soaping and rinsing again; his dad gets home before he has to say anything more to Scott.

::-------------------------------------::

An hour later Stiles and Scott are down at the station in the Sheriff’s office sitting across from his dad.

“Do we have to tell Derek?” _Please,_ thinks Stiles, _please, just… no._

“I need his help finding Peter,” his dad says, more gently than he’s spoken to Stiles in months. “I’m sorry, son.”

Stiles, slumped in the visitor chair across from his dad’s desk, raises his head from his hands and looks, really looks, at his dad. He sees lines in his face he doesn’t remember. He sees boiling rage underneath them. He wonders how his dad can marshal his emotions like he does, how he can enslave them, make them fuel his tempered purpose.

Another image flashes in his mind before he can shut it out, a wailing, pantsless child, lifted off the ground by one arm, the other tiny, clawed hand trying uselessly to cover her little butt. Stiles dry-heaves and his nose starts running like a dripping faucet. His dad whips around his desk and crouches down in front of Stiles, handkerchief in hand. Scott lays a heavy hand on the back of Stiles’s neck.

“I can’t stop seeing them. I can’t stop—” and then his dad has him tight in his trembling arms, both of them, Scott captured, too, all of them holding on for dear life.

“I know,” his dad says, voice breaking. “I know. Me, either.”

::-------------------------------------::

Stiles’s dad is on the phone with Deputy Parrish when Derek comes in looking like questions, and sits down on the other side of Stiles from Scott. Stiles hears, “don’t bother”, “judge”, and “warrant”, and doesn’t listen to the rest. Parrish knows how to keep things quiet. 

Scott leans forward and looks at Derek. “Are you all right?”

Stiles looks at Derek’s leg but he’s obviously changed out of his bloody clothes. He can’t tell anything’s wrong. “I got 19 stitches. Melissa put a waterproof bandage over them and said to call her if I get a fever. I have to go back in a week and get it checked.”

Stiles sits quietly in the chair, blank and raw. Derek’s hand lands on his shoulder and squeezes briefly, bringing him back from his thoughts just as his dad hangs up the phone.

“The laptop computer that was stolen from your loft,” says Stiles’s dad, eyes on his paperwork, voice steady and calm, sounding for all the world like this is just another routine questioning. “Is it yours?”

“No,” says Derek, easy and free, curious. “It’s Peter’s. Why? Did you find it?”

In a voice that breaks, Stiles’s dad explains in three sentences what they found on it.

Derek’s standing and growling as though he were still a wolf by the time his dad finishes. “Let. Me. See,” he growls. He’s squeezed Stiles’s shoulder so hard that Stiles can feel the blood pooling and bruising underneath each fingertip.

“Sit down, Derek.” When Derek remains standing, chest heaving and terrible expression on his face, Stiles’s dad says, “Please, son. If I showed you I’d be breaking the law.”

Derek sits, eventually, close enough to Stiles that he recognizes that it’s Derek’s way of asking for comfort. He puts his hand on Derek’s where it still grips his shoulder while his dad asks for Derek’s help locating Peter. By the time Derek says “Yes,” Stiles has five perfect, round bruises in the skin of his shoulder. They’re trying to throb their way out from under his plaid flannel, but it doesn’t faze him – he hasn’t felt this grounded since before he saw the pictures. 

::-------------------------------------::

They track Peter to the abandoned rail station. Stiles is with them, and maybe later he’ll be ashamed of what he snarled at his dad to let him come. The moment his dad sees Peter, he pulls a gun out of his coat and puts a bullet in his heart. Stiles looks at his dad’s holster; his service weapon is still in it.

Peter falls to his knees, trying to heal around the bullet. “What, no parley first, Sheriff?”

“I told you last time I pulled a gun on you there wasn’t going to be a third time,” says his dad. “Deputy Parrish confirmed that the pictures on your computer were the same ones we found on your digital camera. Peter Hale, you are under arrest for child sexual abuse and endangerment, and the creation and dissemination of child pornographic images.” 

Peter heaves a breath, and blood bubbles out of the corners of his mouth. He blinks and sneers. “And how, exactly, are you going to explain those images? Those little wolves and wendigos? Those little _monsters_?”

Stiles’s brain whites out and it’s all he can do not to shriek with rage. He doesn’t know he moves until he realizes Derek’s pulling him back, holding him down as though he were about to take flight. Derek wraps his arms around Stiles’s chest, holding him tight, holding him up while Stiles shakes and his blood boils.

“Who said anything about explaining?”

Stiles’s dad very deliberately approaches Peter, taking care to stay far enough away from teeth and swinging claws. He and turns the gun to the side and shows it to Peter. There’s a fleur-de-lis on the barrel. He takes two steps back, then takes aim.

Peter’s eyes flash a sick, moldy teal. “They’re beyond your reach. You’ll never find them, and there’s no one else looking for them. Not anymore.” He sneers.

“But it doesn’t matter. I did what I said I’d do.” His voice rises until he’s practically singing. “I said I’d remake each and every one of those little monsters in my own image, and I did. They’re all like me now. _Broken._ ” He tips his head back and howls, an echo of the anguish threatening to take over Stiles’s heart ever since he saw that first image.

In a flash, Scott leaps. He lands claws first into the back of Peter’s neck. His eyes flash red. As he learns Peter’s secrets, his eyes grow and spread, his skin darkens and his fangs sprout outliers that fill up his mouth. His voice is gravel when he slams Peter into the floor and grinds out, “He killed their families. I know where he hid the bodies, and I know where he’s holding the kids.”

His dad shoots twice: a perfect double tap behind Peter’s right ear.

::-------------------------------------::

“I should cut him in half.”

Stiles leans back against the windows and stares at the gibbous moon over the balcony wall. Derek doesn’t seem like he needs Stiles to respond to that, but Stiles needs to confess and get rid of his guilt, though it will likely cost him dearly.

“It hurt so much, thinking they might be yours. Like claws in my chest.”

Derek flinches, then draws away to the other side of the balcony. “Get out.”

“Derek—”

“I said, GET OUT!”

“Derek, please!” Stiles rises to his knees. Derek descends on him from the other side of the balcony. Stiles quakes, and does the only thing he can think of – bares his neck – just as he realizes that Derek’s not a wolf anymore and baring his neck won’t have the effect—

Derek crashes into Stiles and plasters him to the concrete floor of the balcony, crushing his shoulders into his spine as he leans into Stiles’s neck. His beard grates against Stiles’s ear. “I. Would. _Never_. Hurt. A cub.” 

Stiles’s muscles turn to liquid and dance. It’s touch and go whether or not his bladder’s going to hold as he says, “I know! I know you wouldn’t!” His voice shakes along with the hot shaking in his body. “I thought it was your laptop, and I didn’t know what to think!”

Derek’s moist breath bursts against Stiles’s ear.

“I’m sorry! Derek, I’m sorry.”

Derek’s up and off him, backed against the balcony wall, taking great, heaving breaths. He looks at his hands, then Stiles’s shoulders, then at his hands again. The cool night air blankets Stiles’s hot shaking. When Derek’s breathing settles down, he says, “I’m sorry, too.” Stiles feels the bones ache in his shoulders where Derek compressed them in his grip. It echoes the ache in his heart. He sees the space between them in the night air, an inky, dark gap cut off from the moonlight: an untraversible gorge. He has nothing to drop into it but words.

“How could someone _do that_ to a beautiful, innocent child? How does a kid heal from that?”

“I don’t know.”

They stand and stare at one another, and Stiles couldn’t care less that his eyes are filling up and spilling over, but apparently Derek does. And the words are a bridge, and Derek crosses over into Stiles’s space and wraps him deep in his arms. They stay there until there’s a sizable patch of wetness on Derek’s shoulder.

“What are they going to do? Where are they going to go?” Stiles asks, some time later. Derek eases him down to the balcony floor between his legs and holds him with both arms against his chest, and Stiles feels anchored. The moon drifts slowly around the sky until it’s hidden by the side of the building. By the time Derek answers, Stiles has almost forgotten he’s asked a question.

“We’ll help them. I still have the money we recovered from the benefactor’s assassins. It’s enough to – we’ll build an orphanage. A private orphanage. And we’ll hire the best psychiatric help we can get for them.” Derek grows more excited as he plans out loud. “There’s fifty four million dollars. It should be more than enough. We’ll hire wolves and wendigos to staff it. They’ll go to school. They’ll grow up. We’ll pay a full ride scholarship wherever they want to go to college.”

Stiles brings his arms up and wraps them around Derek’s. “We’ll give them family. And Scott will give them pack.”

Derek huffs in his ear, a more contented sound than Stiles ever remembers hearing from him. But after awhile, Stiles feels him grow restless.

“Peter…” Derek begins, bitter. “I can’t do anything until I cut him in half. But I don’t know if I can do it.”

Stiles feels the rage roil up underneath his skin, stirred by Derek’s agitation, but tempered now, in the aftermath of his helplessness. The same helplessness Derek must have felt all his life, knowing hunters cut his kind in half for fun and profit. Stiles feels it gathered into a white-hot ball buried deep inside, and he sends down a tap root. He draws enough energy to push everything away except Derek’s concern. “That’s valid. Hunters – they’ve earned your disgust.”

“I need a guarantee. I deserve – _we_ deserve – closure. He needs to be permanently stopped.”

Stiles draws another sip of energy from the white-hot ball, stills his trembling as it begins. This must be how his father maintains his cool. He says, steady as a surgeon’s hand, “Well, if you can’t do it, _I_ can.”

 _With pleasure_.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warning explanation:** There are two paragraphs of graphic descriptions of child sexual and emotional abuse that a character sees in some pictures they find, and two descriptions of the character remembering those pictures. In the pictures, young children from about 4 to 8 years of age are treated like animals, handled roughly, hit, humiliated, and put in sexual situations. The perpetrator is brought to justice and the children rescued, and a future is discussed for them where they will receive the best possible care that anyone could hope for, for the rest of their lives.


End file.
